What do you do when your bike advocate works for Satan?
December 3, 2019 § 25 Comments
One of the most confounding things for bicycle riders trying to objectively decide about how to make safer streets is knowing the motivation of any particular advocate. Most present themselves as bicycle riders who simply want to get around without being frightened, harassed, injured, or killed.
And whether the advocate works on Wall Street or at Taco Bell, votes for Warren or for Trump, that commonality of interest is what brings advocates together. However, at least in the LA advocacy community, the political leanings of most advocates are left-ish, and some are far left.
Why is that? It’s because leftish politics view the environment, multi-modal transportation, and social justice regardless of income as part of a political worldview. This worldview contrasts and is often in conflict with rightish politics, which tend to support cars as the preferred mode, don’t think that environmental issues are paramount, and believe that the more money you earn, the more rights you should have.
Of course there are many Trump-loving cyclists in LA, and a whole bunch of left-leaning drivers who hate bicycles, so you shouldn’t simply judge a fish by his political preference. Nonetheless, when an advocate presents an idea, and more importantly when he presents himself as “one of us,” we have a right to know if he really is.
This isn’t because conservative bicyclists don’t have great ideas or support smart, sensible things as related to street safety. It’s because transparency is what allows us to factor in a person’s other interests with the interest they are presenting to us as solutions for safer streets.
I read over the insults of Peter Flax in my Sunday blog and wondered, “Why is this guy so mad at me? I hit him for writing a crappy article and pointed out what I thought were inconsistencies and a horrible philosophy, i.e. his belief that a dead cyclist was a silver lining for bike infrastructure, and he went after me as if I’d called him a fake and a fraud.”
I chewed on that. “Well,” I thought, “maybe he is.”
What did I really know about Peter Flax? Who is he? I’d read some of his work online before and generally liked it. But what are his credentials as a bike advocate? What is it about being upbraided by a leaky prostate blogger that would set fire to a guy who is the editor in chief for Red Bulletin?
So I googled, and the more I read, the more surprised I became. Former editor in chief of Bicycling Magazine. Former features editor for the Hollywood Reporter (knew that). Regular contributor to Outside and Red Kite Prayer. Then I scrolled through some of his stories. Legit stuff. Carefully written. Pro-cyclist. Anti-car. The guy has chops, period.
None of it made sense. Why was he hurling personal invective and challenging me to a debate, of all things, as if a writer couldn’t defend himself adequately in print and wanted to “settle this in person”? What was next? A challenge to a bike race? (I would win that, btw.) So I thought back to an earlier comment I’d made on Facebook about an interview he’d done with John Forester that had really angered him, suggesting that he’d eased off on his advocacy now that he was repping the corporate interests of Red Bull.
And then I thought about how I’d led off my Sunday blog by remarking on how corporate-ish he seemed lately. Could it be that these comments, along with my jabs at Bicycling Magazine, had wounded his pride? Or was he hiding something? Or both?
Back to Google, where I started reading about Red Bull, the drink, and its health effects on small kids. Guess what? No studies show that this stuff improves either physical or cognitive performance, or that regular users grow wings. Guess what else? The American Academy of Pediatricians says this:
In a new clinical report, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) outlines how these products are being misused, discusses their ingredients, and provides guidance to decrease or eliminate consumption by children and adolescents. The report, “Sports Drinks and Energy Drinks for Children and Adolescents: Are They Appropriate ?” is published in the June 2011 issue of Pediatrics (published online May 30).
https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/Pages/Kids-Should-Not-Consume-Energy-Drinks,-and-Rarely-Need-Sports-Drinks,-Says-AAP.aspx
This of course is the tip of the iceberg. Red Bull is banned in Denmark and Norway, and was banned for years in France. At least one randomized clinical trial shows that energy drinks like Red Bull cause increases in blood pressure, indicating that the drinks may be dangerous for people with high blood pressure. Most interesting is the language in the abstract that talks about how these drinks are marketed to children, which of course is chapter and verse out of the tobacco industry’s manual. More about that later.
Another study concludes that
… although energy drinks may have beneficial effects on physical performance, these products may also have possible detrimental health consequences. Marketing of energy drinks should be limited or forbidden until independent research confirms their safety, particularly among adolescents.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4682602/
On its face I suppose you could shrug and say, well, a fellow has to make a living, and Peter makes his pimping Red Bull. Sure, he probably doesn’t let his own kids drink it, and he probably knows that it’s not the healthiest choice in the checkout line, but it’s not as if he’s selling drones to kill kids in Syria.
Of course this is also what you’d have to say regarding his stint as editor-in-chief of Bicycling Magazine. It’s a corporate advertising rag whose mission is to sell shit to new riders. That’s their demographic and why they pump out the same old stories every year. If you have to make the same excuse for someone twice, is that a pattern? I don’t know.
But back to Red Bull. Would you want to know that your bicycling advocate is the head magazine editor when it comes to marketing unhealthy and potentially unsafe drinks to little kids at the same time he’s advising you about things like the safety of highly controversial things like bike infrastructure? I guess I would want to know it, but maybe once I did, I wouldn’t really care … that much. Everyone has to make compromises, and Peter’s clearly moving up in the world. He lives in one of the richest zip codes in America, right? And since when is the pursuit of wealth in America a crime? Most importantly, in general ideas need to stand and fall on their own merits, regardless of who’s pushing them. But as with disclosures of financial support that are required in clinical trials, knowing who has a dog in the hunt matters.
And I felt bad, too. Why couldn’t I cut him some slack? He writes good stuff on the side of cyclists. We may disagree about methods but he’s hardly the enemy, and it’s these internecine battles that full blown cycling opponents use to fracture our unity. And of course it reminded me that getting in people’s grill is my way of life and it has a lot to not recommend it, both as a personality trait and as way of fitting in.
Problem? I couldn’t get Red Bull out of my head. So back to Google.
Who is Red Bull? What does it stand for? Why does it matter?
I quickly hit pay dirt in the form of an interview given by Dietrich Mateschitz, the billionaire owner of Red Bull, in 2017. It’s in German, and the complete interview is behind a paywall. However, big chunks of it have been excerpted, also in German, and after subscribing and reading the full interview, the more outraged I got. Not because Mateschitz is a reactionary, Trump-leaning, anti-immigrant businessman who gives a regular platform to the most extreme right wing ideologues in Austria, but because Peter Flax, bicycle advocate, cynically steers Red Bull in the USA to young kids while never talking frankly about this corporate ideology. What follow are excerpts from the interview with Mateschitz:
Q: Ist das schon eine positive Kategorie? Viele sind schockiert über Trumps erratische Sprunghaftigkeit.
https://www.kleinezeitung.at/steiermark/chronik/5197881/Dietrich-Mateschitz-im-Interview_Red-BullChef-rechnet-mit
A: Diese Frage bietet sich schon an, natürlich. Aber vor allem halte ich die derzeitige Hysterie für lächerlich. Nur weil etwas außerhalb der eigenen Ideologie ist? Das Schlechte an der Demokratie ist, dass die Mehrheit nicht immer recht hat. Das Gute ist, dass das Irren korrigierbar ist, dass jeder genauso schnell abgewählt werden kann, wie er gewählt wurde. Man soll Trump Zeit geben.
On immigration in Europe:
Q: Was stört Sie konkret?
Kleine Zeitung, 2017
A: Zum Beispiel das unverzeihliche Ausmaß der politischen Fehleinschätzungen und Fehlentscheidungen bei der Nichtbewältigung der Flüchtlingswelle oder, besser gesagt, der Auswanderungswelle. Ich glaube nicht, dass es ein klarer Ausdruck politischen Willens war, die Grenzen unkontrolliert offen zu lassen. Man hat aus Angst und politischer Opportunität so entschieden. Schon damals war für jedermann erkennbar, dass der Großteil der Menschen nicht der Definition des Flüchtlings entsprach. Jedenfalls nicht der der Genfer Konvention.
These and other utterances criticizing political correctness, lambasting Brussels for supposedly trying to wipe out homogenous (i.e. “white) cultures, attacking the current political atmosphere in Austria, and voicing support for the now-disgraced, right-wing ex-chancellor Sebastian Kurz, by themselves aren’t much more than evidence of a very right-leaning billionaire. So what else is new?
But with Mateschitz, it’s never just opinions, it’s also actions. And his actions are like his sports: they are extreme. His TV program Hangar-7 is a regular platform for some of the most hard-core right-wing extremists in Austria, including booted Interior Minister and immigrant hating racist Herbert Kickl (guest speaker at Europe’s congress of extremist right wing parties), reactionary anti-feminist Birgit Kelle, and politician Marcus Franz, famous for insisting on a man’s right to grab women by the ass and also holding that homosexuality is immoral and that poor people should have their right to vote revoked.
This is the real Red Bull with all the advertising, glossy photo covers, and slick prosemanship stripped away. It stands for something, and I think that a large proportion of the community of cycling advocates would agree that what it stands for isn’t good. Trump. Anti-immigrant. Reactionary feminism. Legitimized sexual assault. Homophobia. Hatred of the poor. Are these your shared values? They aren’t mine. And if they aren’t Peter’s he damned well needs to step up and distance himself from them.
Unfortunately, he works for Mateschitz, so that ain’t gonna happen. The closest we get is this piece of bootlicking on Twitter.
The Hangar-7 TV show is Mateschitz’s full frontal push to gain acceptance for right wing extremist ideologies, “Under the cover of freedom of speech,” according to Jerome Trebing, a Viennese sociologist and specialist on Austria’s extreme-right scene.
As is always the case with things like this, there’s more. Cyclists who throw in with Red Bull are also throwing in with Mateschitz’s deliberate choice to use athletes like Felix Baumgartner as the product’s spokesman. “Who is that?” I wondered. He’s this charming guy:
“You can’t get anything done in a democracy. We need a moderate dictatorship, where a couple of people out of the business world really know what’s up.”
https://www.morgenpost.de/vermischtes/article110340228/Felix-Baumgartner-plaediert-fuer-eine-gemaessigte-Diktatur.html
Wow. A couple of businessmen, maybe one named “Donald” and the other named “Dietrich” and all of our problems will be solved. Heck, we’re halfway there.
Which brings me back to Red Bull’s magazine and its explicit marketing of an unhealthy, potentially unsafe drink to children. Because this, not TV shows in Austria, is what Peter Flax really does for a living. When the American Academy of Pediatricians said that “Sports and energy drinks are being marketed to children and adolescents for a variety of inappropriate uses,” Red Bull hit back.
“We do not market our product to children and other sensitive people.”
https://www.beveragedaily.com/Article/2011/06/03/Red-Bull-denies-child-marketing-claims-in-new-study
This is pretty black-and-white. Either they do, or they don’t. So I went to the Red Bulletin web site and looked at “Latest Stories.” First article? It’s about Zion Wright skateboarder, age 20. So I googled “skateboarding demographics” and learned that there are six million skaters in the U.S. and the vast majority of them are under the age of eighteen. Pair that with Mateschitz’s interview in Kleine Presse where he talks about new younger customers replacing older ones, and with Mateschitz’s emphasis on planning, creativity, and growth through constant fine-tuning, and it all makes sense. Red Bull may be terrible for kids and the company may say it doesn’t market it to them. But it does and it lies about it. And Peter isn’t a cog in the machine, he’s the editor-in-chief of Red Bull’s major English language publication in the company’s largest market. Don’t think for even a second that Dietrich Mateschitz doesn’t read every single word.
But are these Peter’s real beliefs? They don’t seem to be, judging from his work in Outside and other places.
It’s a fair question to ask him, I think. If Red Bull doesn’t market its products to children, who was the target audience of the article? MAMIL’s? Hoary commuter cyclists with lights and mirrors trundling down bike lanes? Soccer moms? Or … kids? And I think it’s fair to ask him how he reconciles his corporate ideology with his advocacy.
When I finally came up for air I had to shake my head. What does any of this have to do with Peter Flax and bike infrastructure? With a guy who described dead cyclists as a “silver lining” for infrastructure building? With someone who writes a lot of good stuff in favor of cyclists and in opposition to motordom?
I suppose it doesn’t mean too much, except this: It’s okay with me if you work for Satan if you’re genuinely advocating for safer streets. And it’s okay with me if you’re sprinkling holy water on the devil’s footsteps. But maybe if people knew that’s what you were doing, they’d think more critically about what it is you really stand for. It might not make a difference either way, but here’s the funny thing about transparency:
Maybe it would.
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Dead cyclists
December 1, 2019 § 106 Comments
If you want to read a meaningless puff piece about cycling fatalities, check out this stinker by Peter Flax. It’s no surprise that it’s published in Bicycling Magazine, a publication that exists only to Sell More Shit.
What is a surprise is that Peter wrote it. He’s normally a great writer but lately his work has a pretty ugly corporate aftertaste to it, and this is perhaps the worst piece he’s ever written. Basically, he falls into lock-step with motordom, arguing that the solution to cycling fatalities is more bike lanes.
Which is crazy because the article he writes says exactly the opposite. It’s as if someone walks you through the principles of arithmetic and then announces at the end, “See? 2 +2 = 5.”
To sum up, the article claims that more cyclists are dying because of larger cars, more smartphone use, more people driving more miles, more cyclists, and Zero Vision (a/k/a A Bike Lane in Every Pot) has stalled. I’ll get to the ridiculous conclusion that we need more bike infrastructure, but first a word about the cause, singular, that Peter and like-minded advocates refuse to analyze: Cyclists get hit because motorists don’t see them.
That’s right, folks. If larger cars and more miles and more cell phone use were the cause of collisions, then we’d be seeing more car-on-car fatalities as well, or at least a parallel uptick in collisions. We see the opposite. Cyclist deaths have increased 37%, whereas auto fatalities are up about 14% over a 5-year period, less than half that of cycling deaths. While cycling deaths rise, traffic fatalities as a whole have leveled off; there was actually a 1% decrease between 2017 and 2018.
To repeat: Cyclists get hit for the most part because motorists do not see them. It’s that simple.
And it’s a horrible analysis for the purposes of Zero Vision advocates, because these people are convinced that the solution to not being seen is to create segregated bike lanes and the like, even as they admit that such programs are stalled, or that they are long-term, or that implementation will more less always be blocked by angry motorists … like Flax’s co-residents in Manhattan Beach, whose rage at losing a lane of traffic on Vista Del Mar resulted in de-striping a Zero Vision bike lane.
Any logic or fact that points to something simpler, faster, and less expensive than a billion-dollar pork barrel infrastructure project gets ignored because Zero Vision advocates aren’t really interested in fixing the problem so much as they’re interested in the political process of allocating and spending the public pork. The best example? This incredibly damning paragraph in Flax’s article:
So while the NTSB analysis focused primarily on encouraging or mandating greater helmet use, as well as things cyclists, road designers, and carmakers should do so riders are more conspicuous to motorists, those factors don’t really explain why a serious, sustained uptick of deaths began in 2011. It’s not like helmet use had a major decline, or cities ripped out quality protected bike lanes, or high-viz apparel or auto headlights got worse. These factors, especially related to road design, might have an impact on fatalities going forward, but they don’t explain why more cyclists have been dying in the past decade.
https://www.bicycling.com/culture/a29762318/why-more-cyclists-are-dying/?fbclid=IwAR3VHm7AINKjqaROowsfLjGH85QyH-ozTVmOHquWJMf0dUVVMbwOs0ugE2w
Let’s break this down. First, Flax lists the flawed NTSB analysis about how to decrease cycling fatalities. He rightly notes that encouraging or mandating greater helmet use doesn’t explain increased deaths. If more people are riding and wearing helmets, why are more people still dying?
But he lumps “things cyclists, road designers, and carmakers should do so riders are more conspicuous to motorists” together with helmets as if more steps to encourage cyclist visibility to prevent fatalities is the same as wearing more helmets to mitigate the effects of getting hit. They are emphatically not the same. Helmets, to the extent that they do anything, protect you after you’ve been hit. Wearing more helmets won’t decrease collisions, and the cause of cyclist fatalities is the collision. As advocates have long noted, putting the blame on the cyclist, “You didn’t have a helmet so you deserved to die after that soccer mom hit you while texting,” is the epitome of victim blaming and abdication of responsibility for making the streets safer for bikes.
No, the things that cyclists can do to be more conspicuous to motorists is the absolute core of savvy cycling because it’s the one thing we absolutely know: Except in the most extreme cases, drivers do not intentionally hit cyclists. They hit them because cyclists are inconspicuous.
The corollary to this is key. Whereas more helmets won’t prevent collisions, more conspicuousness will. And bike lanes do not foster conspicuousness, they shunt riders off to the edge, where poor design and narrow roads force riders into the door zone or onto the far edge of the bike lane, next to the giant SUV mirrors and bumpers of passing traffic. Bike lanes are especially hazardous when they are random tack-ons, as they are here in LA, where you have a nice, wide green stripe that cars generally respect … until the stripe goes away for no reason at all.
The only thing that will keep you off mom’s windshield is being seen. And the only ways to reliably be seen by every car are to 1) park your ass in the travel lane when it makes sense to do so, and 2) illuminate yourself like an emergency vehicle rushing to a train wreck. I’ve found that even when splitting lanes or playing gutter bunny, huge lights alert cars and they take pains not to hit me.
Flax’s conclusion that we need more bike lanes is as horrific as it is nonsensical. He concludes that the death of a rider in NYC has a silver lining because it has caused a push in major bike lane/infrastructure construction, even though fatalities continue to increase as bike lanes continue to be built. “Hi, ma’am, sorry your son got run over by that dump truck. Here is a bike lane for you along with that one he was in when he got hit. Enjoy.”
This idiocy is on me-too parade in places like Encinitas, where North County planners, in response to more dead cyclists, have approved construction of a short “protected” bike lane (materializes out of nowhere, ends randomly) that will protect cars, but not the riders who are forced to dodge moms, dads, kids, surfers, walkers, strollers, and other traffic funneled into the Zero Vision solution.
Why won’t people simply admit that the best way to prevent getting hit is to be seen, and spread the word? Unless you’re willing to build a national network of protected bike lanes, at some point every rider is going to see that dreadful “Bike Lane Ends” sign and know that she is back in traffic, to say nothing of riders who pedal outside the inner city limits of LA and NYC, which is virtually all of them.
Riders do a great job of teaching others to do things like wear helmets. Public shaming, private admonition, and a whole host of other peer-pressure tools are instantly brought to bear that result in near-uniformity in cycling behavior when it comes to helmets. Similarly riders do a great job of teaching others lane control and conspicuousness when they understand it.
When I began teaching lane control on PCH several years back, the leader of my riding club publicly scorned the effort as dangerous and crazy. This very guy now leads every weekend ride down PCH … in the lane, and everyone in the club now knows that you’re safer when you’re seen. This behavior has converted hundreds, if not thousands of riders on PCH to take the lane when it makes sense to do so. And it hasn’t cost a penny of public money or required a single drop of green paint.
Cyclists don’t need infrastructure that’s never going to be built to keep them alive. They are perfectly capable of understanding concepts and passing them on, especially when survival is at stake.
But ridiculous articles brushing aside cyclist conspicuousness in favor of hiding cyclists from the traffic flow actively work to endanger more people, all under cover of a publication supposedly dedicated to cyclists written by a guy who ferfuxake actually commutes by bike.
The sad answer is that it’s easier to blame SUVs and cell phones sipping coffee at your keyboard than it is to take a Cycling Savvy class, move two feet over, and dump $500 into a legitimate bike lighting rig.
Oh, and don’t forget to wear your helmet. That’ll keep them from running you over, for sure.
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The sting of defeat
October 19, 2017 § 35 Comments
I winced when I saw a couple of recent tweets by Peter Flax and Ted Rogers acknowledging that their support for the road diets in Playa del Rey and other parts of Los Angeles have been beaten back by the entitled cager class. Peter has written a great article about the fake democracy, fake news, and relentless trolling that has played an outsized role in perverting government on the local level into what it mostly is on the national level: Everything for me, nothing for you, with “me” being the wealthy and “you” being everyone else.
Flax, Rogers, and a whole host of advocates are feeling the pain that South Bay cyclists felt last year when the PV Estates City Council, fueled by the trolling of Garrett Unno and his horrible wife Zoe, the unprincipled rage of bad people like Cynthia Zaragoza, and the anonymous, pseudonymous trolling by Robert Lewis Chapman, Jr., voted to shelve any proactive steps that would make PV safer for vulnerable road users. Flax and Rogers have come to grips with two nasty realities:
- The trolls oppose policies that can prevent killing or maiming vulnerable road users.
- The trolls see such bloodshed as a reasonable price for their convenience.
- The trolling powerfully affects the levers of governmental power.
When the realization hits, it’s devastating. Voting, canvassing, public debate, even modest funding by advocacy groups … all of these things lose to the power of the trolls. The power of a few moderately wealthy, angry trolls who have lots of time on their hands and limitless spleen to vent can galvanize entire voting blocs and can steamroll the needs of the many for the selfish wants of the few. Facts, data, logic, and republican ideals of protecting the weakest in society are laughable concepts that mean nothing when it comes to making transportation decisions regarding bicyclists and pedestrians.
With regard to making LA’s streets safer for vulnerable road users, though, the defeat is largely a function of advocates’ failure use existing law. Road diets, road striping, segregated cycle tracks, and bike lanes are the byproduct of a cyclist-inferiority pathology that has been vigorously promoted by cagers and motordom. Thanks to relentless fearmongering, many cyclists now believe that the only way they can safely use the roadways is by being segregated from it, and their overwhelming fear is of being hit from the rear, even though statistics show that such collisions are a minority of all car-bike collisions.
The bitter truth is this: Whether or not cyclists think that lane control works, road diets and bike infrastructure won’t work in Los Angeles’s angry, white urban areas. White and affluent cagers have shown that they are more than happy to subsidize the perception of speed and efficiency with more pedestrian/cycling deaths. It’s no different from the blase attitude towards the Las Vegas Massacre and Terrorist Attack. Such deaths are the well known, well accepted, and perfectly irrational price that America is more than happy to pay for the unrestricted right to have and use guns. Why should additional dead and maimed vulnerable road users be any different?
Hint: They aren’t.
Unlike the road diets that are never going to happen and the citywide carving out of bike lanes from normal traffic lanes that will never come to pass, lane control uses existing law to empower cyclists and make their activities safer. But empowerment isn’t something that comes and knocks at your door. You have to take it.
This means knowing the circumstances under which you are entitled to take up the full travel lane, when you have to ride as far to the right as practicable, and when you have to pull over to let faster traffic through. Learning these things and pounding them into the heads of cyclists is a task that few advocacy groups want to do because they are so committed to the infrastructure policies that angry cager Angelenos have proven they will never accept. I challenge anyone in LA County Bike Coalition to come to PV Estates or Rancho PV, two of the best cycling destinations in America, and make any headway at all against the evil mayor and her callus henchwankers. To add to the impossibility of positive policies, monstrous and slothful bike hater Zoe Unno now sits on the traffic safety committee. It’s like putting the wolf in charge of the henhouse and giving her a carving knife and gas range to boot.
If bike advocates haven’t gotten the message, they need to listen again: Los Angeles isn’t going to cede an inch of roadway for your exclusive use. So admit defeat and take up arms using existing law: Teach your friends and fellow cyclists, and most importantly teach yourself how to ride safely and legally in the traffic lane. After my years of experience with this technique, I’m confident you’ll find that the water is fine.
Another harsh reality has gradually become clear. As unfair as it may be, and as much of a double standard as it is, we are at a point in cager-bike relations when you have to take care of yourself first. This means lights. If you’re running anything less than two powerful headlamps and anything less than 3-4 powerful lights from the rear at all times, day and night, you are heaping additional risk onto yourself, especially if you are still riding in the gutter or in the door zone. As much as the PV cagers may hate cyclists, the chances are slim that they will kill you intentionally–with the exception, of course, of John Bacon, who appears to have died precisely because of an intentional hit.
In short, the people have spoken: They hate you and don’t care if you die. But at the same time, they don’t want to get your blood on their hood or, even worse, see an increase in their insurance premium. So take the lane. Ride like a Christmas tree. It still beats living on Mom’s couch.
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Don’t get hit and then what?
September 15, 2017 § 24 Comments
There are a lot of dark stories in the world today about the cager v. biker wars. And they are wars. The bikers get killed and maimed and the cagers get a speeding ticket. The bikers put in an imaginary magic protection road stripe and the cagers rip it out. The bikers say “You’re killing us!” and the cagers say “Exactly!” Cf. Jennifer King and the troll triumvirate of Garrett Uno, Cynthia “the Beast” Uno, Robert Lewis Chapman, Jr., and the unbearable heaviness of cager hate and stunted lives of those who wage it.
Maybe I will get around to expanding on this article by Peter Flax, but I doubt it. How do you expand on the universe? Read it and bleed.
However, on September 21 from 6:30 PM to 9:30 PM at Performance Bicycle in Long Beach, I will be expanding on my own tiny little universe of how not to get killed while riding your bike. If you’re in the neighborhood I hope you can make it.
Performance Bicycle, Long Beach
Cycling Savvy, led by Big Orange’s own Gary Cziko, has been instrumental in the last two years teaching people the very best in Bee Gees riding techniques, i.e. “Stayin’ Alive.” Gary’s techniques work. There are two parts of the Cycling Savvy curriculum, however, that are either ignored or lightly addressed, kind of like not enough vinaigrette on a mountain of salad, and I’m going to talk about them at the event in Long Beach.
- What to do if you’re a victim or witness to a bike-car collision.
- How to protect yourself and your family if you or they get hit while cycling.
- How not to get hit through insane use of over-the-top lighting, day and night.
Performance is supporting the seminar with some killer deals on, guess what, lighting. There will also be covfefe to keep you awake. However, I can promise that you won’t need it, or you’ll get your money back at this free event.
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PS: Don’t forget the Wanky’s. As if you could.
Cycling in the South Bay 